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    How could I not be pleased?" asks Keith Hamilton Cobb, who co-stars opposite Kevin Sorbo and Lisa Ryder in the freshman sci-fi series Gene Rodenberry’s Andromeda. "We’ve received a lot of good press and a lot of positive fan feedback. "The target audience is generally thrilled."

As the perpetually intense, single-minded and unpredictable Tyr Anasazi, descended from a genetically engineered race of super humans called Nietzscheans, Cobb provides much of the syndicated show’s edge. And, thanks to Cobb’s steely portrayal, detractors who initially compared the Nietzscheans to Star Trek's Klingons pretty much have been silenced.

"I think we disproved that comparison," Cobb says during a telephone call from his home in Westchester County, N.Y., "and we will continue to disprove it. I don’t think it was an astute analogy early on, anyway, it was a knee-jerk reaction.

"People made judgment calls about that and several other things early on," he says. "It’s a new show. The Nietzscheans were not meant to be anything like Klingons and, in fact, they are not. Anybody who still wants to make that analogy will make it; it’s easy, but it’s just not so.

"We’re privy to the evolution of the Nietzscheans, and we will see it more and more as we go along with the show."

Cobb describes the dreadlock-sporting Tyr as a lone soldier, a warrior separated from any social structure, deprived of the data, nurturing and indoctrination one gains from belonging to a culture or a community.

Now he roams the universe with Dylan Hunt (Sorbo) and the crew of the Andromeda Ascendant, but he does so reluctantly, for his own reasons and not as a team player, as shown in such episodes as D Minus Zero, Double Helix, Angel Dark, Demon Bright, All Great Neptune’s Ocean and, most recently, The Music of a Distant Drum.

"The fans are half-justified in saying that we haven’t seen a great evolution in the character," says Cobb, for whom series writer/co-executive producer

Robert Hewitt Wolfe specifically created Tyr and the Nietzscheans, "because it hasn’t been explored yet on camera.. But the foundation is there. Tyr has a history. His people have a history.

"He is removed from that history," Cobb adds, "which is a good thing. It allows him to be more profoundly affected by what other people do and say, to consider concepts beyond himself and his needs.

"It also causes him psychological turmoil that is interesting to watch on camera."

As the show’s first season builds to its finale in May, by which time Cobb will already have returned to the Andromeda set in Vancouver, British Columbia, to film 22 episodes for the second season, Cobb reports that Tyr will remain Tyr. That fact pleases the actor, who has feared that Tyr will grow too soft too soon.

"That’s the flaw of so much television writing," says Cobb, who stands 6-foot-4 and counts among his credits episodes of Beast Master and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a Daytime Emmy Award-nominated stint on the soap opera All My Children and numerous classical and contemporary stage productions. He also was deemed One of the 50 most beautiful people in the world by People magazine in 1996.

"When you establish a character that has some delicious, different qualities, you sometimes worry about painting him into a corner," Cobb says. "So you move him into the center, move him into something that’s perhaps more moralistically palatable.

"I tend to be vigilant about that," he says. "I will safeguard against that. But I worry." Cobb pauses.

"You can make an ally of Tyr if you understand what he wants and needs," he says, but you have to think in his terms, which is what Hunt is trying to do. And you also have to remember that he is a Nietzschean.

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